Beyond the Hills

Les­bian nuns! Exor­cism! A ​‘two-way anus’! Know­ing in advance that these motifs form part of the tex­ture in Cris­t­ian Mungiu’s lat­est fea­ture might lead the unsus­pect­ing view­er to imag­ine that the direc­tor of 4 Months, 3 Weeks And 2 Days has decid­ed to redi­rect the Roman­ian New Wave towards pure exploita­tion, as though fol­low­ing in Waler­ian Borowczyk’s foot­steps from art­house to bawdy-house (in few­er than 20 years, the Pol­ish film­mak­er had gone from dystopi­an debut Goto, Island Of Love to sex sequel Emmanuelle V, apt­ly enough via supe­ri­or nun­sploita­tion­er Behind Con­vent Walls).

Yet a far bet­ter clue as to the tone of Beyond The Hills is the plain white-on-black low­er-case text in which the title first appears on screen giv­en that the film, too, is under­stat­ed and undemon­stra­tive, even as the clash of val­ues that it stages is pos­i­tive­ly incendiary.

Voichi­ta (Cos­mi­na Stratan) picks up Aline (Cristi­na Flu­tur) in an unnamed Roman­ian vil­lage, bring­ing her over a hill to the spar­tan monastery that Voichi­ta now calls home. Voichi­ta and Aline used to share com­pan­ion­ship – and a bed – in the local orphan­age; now Aline – needy, dis­trust­ful, volatile and unable to live with­out her only friend – has returned to take Voichi­ta back west to Germany.

In Aline’s absence, how­ev­er, Voichi­ta has giv­en her­self over, heart and soul, to the ascetic life of a nun and no longer wish­es to leave the monastery. With Aline as devot­ed to Voichi­ta as Voichi­ta is to God, this unortho­dox love tri­an­gle cre­ates an impasse that can only end in tragedy.

For as the already frag­ile Aline is torn apart by her love for Voichi­ta and her dis­dain for Voichita’s ​‘cave’ life, her break­down and its rip­pling impact drama­tise the con­flict between sacred and sec­u­lar, East and West, ancient and mod­ern, in a nation that seems caught, like Aline her­self, on its own con­tra­dic­tions and com­pro­mis­es in the face of unsea­son­able change.

Aline’s predica­ment expos­es gross fail­ings in Romania’s dif­fer­ent insti­tu­tions (child­care, health­care, the police, and, of course, the Church) – and yet if her aber­rant con­duct is ascribed by the monastery’s aus­tere priest (Valeriu Andri­u­ta) to Satan­ic influ­ences, nei­ther he, nor the nuns, nor the doc­tors, nor the orphan­age staff, are ever them­selves demonised for try­ing, in their dif­fer­ent ways, to do the right thing in impos­si­ble circumstances.

“Only God knows,” the priest will say when asked who is to blame for what has hap­pened. ​“Only He doesn’t make mis­takes.” Much of Mungiu’s film is shot wide, the cam­era mim­ic­k­ing an all-see­ing, God-like dis­tance from the human affairs it documents.

In the end, moral judge­ment is lit­er­al­ly sus­pend­ed, as those accused of wrong­do­ing are dri­ven down­town to await an absent prosecutor’s return. After a final, sul­ly­ing image of mud being flung and only par­tial­ly wiped away, the film abrupt­ly plunges us too into darkness.